Red Pepper » Contending for the living

Dare to fail, dare to win

admin — Sun, 30 Dec 2012 10:00:19 +0000

As we approach the tenth anniversary of the global anti-war protest of 15 February 2003, people are bound to ask what it actually achieved. Certainly it failed to stop the war, a failure for which Iraqis paid and are paying an exorbitant price. So was it a waste of time, an exercise in futility? There are answers to these questions, but to be persuasive they cannot be glib.
Let me flash back to 15 November 1969, Washington DC and the Moratorium for Peace in Vietnam. This was probably the single biggest anti-war demonstration of the era, estimated at half a million by some and twice that by others. I’d come down from the New York suburbs the day before, on a bus chartered by local activists, and spent the night on the floor of a Quaker meeting house. The next day I wandered among the vast, mostly youthful crowd, listening to the speeches, and feeling despondent and confused.
I was 16 but already a veteran of three years of anti-war protest, during which time I’d seen the movement mushroom. In the spring of 1966, I’d accompanied my parents to my first Washington DC protest, which was considered a great success because it attracted a crowd of 10,000. Now there were perhaps a hundred times that number and it felt to me like failure.
Pete Seeger, then age 50 but already a Methuselah of struggle, led chorus after chorus of the recently-released ‘Give Peace a Chance’. I was churlish about this because I thought we were or should be saying a lot more than ‘give peace a chance’. So I joined a splinter march chanting ‘Ho Ho Ho Chi Minh, NLF is gonna win’ and got tear gassed outside the Justice Department.
None of this was very satisfying and on the long drive home I felt depressed. What was the point of it all? For years we’d been protesting in ever increasing numbers, with ever increasing militancy – and yet they kept escalating the war. What difference had all our earnest activity made? What difference would the Moratorium protest make? What difference would anything make? My commonplace teenage malaise had become intertwined with a precocious experience of political frustration.
My scepticism about the demonstration’s effect seemed warranted when five months later, at the end of April 1970, the US extended the war into Cambodia. In the protests that followed six students, four at Kent State in Ohio and two at Jackson State in Mississippi, were shot dead. The upshot was the biggest student strike in US history: more than four million students walking out of classes in universities, colleges and high schools across the country. Yet still the war did not end.
Two and a half more years would pass before the peace treaty was signed in Paris in January 1973. By this time there were millions upon millions dead, disabled, bereaved, traumatised. Nonetheless, the movement against the Vietnam war is widely considered the most ‘successful’ anti‑war movement of modern times, against which more recent movements have measured their ‘failure’.
Retrospective vindication
Many years later, I learned that the Moratorium demonstration was, in fact, hugely effective. In July 1969, Nixon and Kissinger had delivered an ultimatum to the Vietnamese: if they did not accept US terms for a ceasefire by 1 November, ‘we will be compelled – with great reluctance – to take measures of the greatest consequences’. The US government was threatening, and indeed actively planning, a nuclear strike against North Vietnam. In his memoirs, Nixon admitted that the key factor in the decision not to proceed with the nuclear option was that ‘after all the protests and the Moratorium, American public opinion would be seriously divided by any military escalation of the war’. What would have been the world’s second nuclear war was averted by our action, though we couldn’t have known it at the time.
So it turns out that marching on that day was anything but an exercise in futility. In fact, it’s hard to think of a day better spent in the course of a lifetime. My teenage despondency was utterly misplaced.
But this kind of retrospective vindication is rare in the extreme. Most days spent in protest will not be rewarded with such a tangible achievement. The point is that we don’t know and we can’t know which protest, leaflet, meeting, occupation, activity will ‘make a difference’. We are always the underdog, we are always contending against power, and therefore the likelihood is that we will fail. But no success can be achieved unless we risk that failure. Otherwise when possibilities for success arise they pass by unrealised.
Beyond ‘success’ and ‘failure’
I fear we slip too easily into a capitalist paradigm of ‘success’ and ‘failure’. Here the investment is of value only to the extent it yields measurable gains. If it doesn’t it’s a failure, dead capital. So we look for evidence that our efforts have had an impact, made a difference. Every success is catalogued on the credit side, while the much greater number of failures is left untabulated. Sometimes in doing this we start to sound a little desperate, clinging to straws. I wonder if this is the best way to persuade people to invest themselves in a cause. After all, there will always be activities offering more reliable and more tangible rewards.
In evaluating our political efforts, we have to jettison neoliberalism’s stark demarcation between success and failure, which erases everything in between and, even worse, denies any combination of the two. In the politics of social justice, unmixed success and unmitigated failure are rare. Every successful revolution or major reform has had unintended consequences, created new problems, fallen short of its goals. In politics, failures contain the seeds of successes, just as successes conceal the roots of failure.
Capitalists like to invoke a ‘risk/reward ratio’ to justify their profits. Sadly, people on the left sometimes emulate their narrow logic. They promise activists a return on their investment, a guarantee: history is on our side.
But for us, there can be no stable ratio between risk and reward. Our risk has to be taken in defiance of the odds, recognising the likelihood that there will be no reward. At the same time, we take the risk only because of the nature of the reward we seek: a precious step towards a just society. We are not at all indifferent to the outcome. We aim and need to succeed because the consequences of failure are real and widely felt.
Investing in a cause
So we make the investment. We put our time and energy and skills at the disposal of a cause. This is a greater investment than the capitalist knows – and one that makes us vulnerable in a way the capitalist never is.
We’re taught to despise and fear failure but to engage in the politics of social change we have to be brave enough to fail. Science advances through failure; every successful experiment is made possible only by a host of failed ones. In human evolution, failure – incapacities, shortcomings – led to compensation and innovation.
There are worse things than failure. You can learn more from a failure than from a success – if you recognise it as such. But if the only lesson you draw from failure is never to risk failure again, you’ve learned nothing at all.
Needless risks should always be avoided. We don’t have resources to squander. But the elimination of risk is impossible if you’re contending with power. Without risks all that can be done is to reproduce existing social relations. There is no truth, no beauty without risk, because these things can only be secured in the teeth of resistance, against institutions and habits of thought. To succeed in any way that matters, you have to take your place in the republic of the uncertain, where you risk yourself, not your stake in other people’s labour. It’s the action taken in the full knowledge of the possibility of failure, and its consequences, that acquires leverage.

The second revolution: 1792

admin — Sat, 01 Dec 2012 12:00:18 +0000

Left to right: Thomas Paine, Thomas Hardy, Theroigne de Mericourt, Mary Wollstonecraft
France 1792 was the year of ‘the second revolution’. On 10 August, the king was overthrown, bringing to an end three years of uneasy ‘constitutional monarchy’. For months the legislative assembly had been locked in conflict with Louis XVI, while at the same time fighting a war against invading Austrians and Prussians. The Parisian masses resolved that conflict by direct action, invading the Tuileries palace and arresting the king. In response, the assembly called a general election – the first election in Europe conducted under universal adult male suffrage. Eighty years would pass before the exercise was repeated.
The elections, held in the first two weeks of September, were festive, proudly democratic occasions marked by wide‑ranging debates, and the results were a resounding confirmation of the action of the Paris masses. The 750 deputies elected to the ‘convention’ were overwhelmingly committed to the formation of a new republic, though they would soon fall out violently over its direction.
The events of 10 August had ushered in not only a new republic but a new power: the plebeian Parisians, who would come to be known as sans-culottes. Organised in the sections (neighbourhood committees) and commune of Paris, in the coming year they would mobilise repeatedly to force their ‘popular programme’ on an often reluctant convention. That programme included not only stiff measures against ‘counter-revolutionaries’ but also price controls and action against hoarders and speculators. If this was a ‘bourgeois revolution’, someone forgot to tell the sans-culottes.
Revolutionary best-seller
The revolutionary impulse overflowed established categories and surged through ancient barriers. In the British isles, the best-seller was Thomas Paine’s Rights of Man, which thanks to its plain but vibrant style and cheap price reached hundreds of thousands, including artisans and labourers.
In Part I, published in early 1791, Paine defended the French Revolution and debunked what passed for the British constitution. ‘The portion of liberty enjoyed in England,’ he observed, ‘is just enough to enslave a country more productively than by despotism.’
In Part II, published in February 1792, Paine amplified his republican arguments. Insisting that ‘only partial advantages can flow from partial reforms,’ he warned: ‘Change of ministers amounts to nothing. One goes out, another comes in, and still the same measures, vices, and extravagance are pursued. It signifies not who is minister. The defect lies in the system.’
Most remarkably, in Part II Paine pushed the democratic revolution into the economic realm. He identified the central contradiction of European progress: ‘A great portion of mankind, in what are called civilised countries, are in a state of poverty and wretchedness, far below the condition of an [American] Indian.’ He went on to propose, in some detail, what would later be known as a welfare state: payments to the elderly, the disabled and parents of young children, universal primary education and public works to provide gainful employment. All this ‘not as a matter of grace and favour, but of right’. And all to be funded by a new system of steeply progressive taxation and cuts in military spending. The search for democracy had led Paine to social democracy.
That there was a ready audience for Paine’s ideas was shown by the rapid growth of the London Corresponding Society, along with similar bodies in Sheffield, Manchester and elsewhere. Dedicated to parliamentary reform and universal male suffrage, the corresponding societies were Britain’s first plebeian political associations, charging dues of only a penny a week. The LCS founding secretary, the shoemaker Thomas Hardy, explained that its members represented ‘a class of men who deserve better treatment than they generally meet with from those who are fed, and clothed, and enriched by their labour, industry or ingenuity’.
Paine and the corresponding societies created a new radical democratic pole in British politics, squarely opposed to and by Pitt’s Tory government. Caught between the two, the liberal Whigs vacillated. Fox and a small band stood out against the attacks on civil liberties and the drift to war with France, but were gradually isolated. Within a year the Whig leaders, driven by their fear of revolution, had joined Pitt’s ministry – not the last time Liberals would respond to a crisis by lining up with Tory reaction.
Global rebellion
Paris was the epicentre, but the repercussions were global. The revolutionary contagion spread to Ireland, where the United Irishmen had been formed a year earlier, and to Scotland, where, in December 1792, the Edinburgh Friends of the People organised a ‘general convention’ for parliamentary reform attended by 160 delegates from 35 Scottish towns and villages.
In the Caribbean, the hugely profitable French colony of Saint-Domingue (now Haiti) was convulsed by a slave revolt of unprecedented dimensions. On 19 August, the man who was to become its greatest general issued an appeal: ‘Brothers and friends, I am Toussaint L’Ouverture, my name is perhaps known to you. I have undertaken vengeance. I want liberty and equality to reign in Saint-Domingue. I work to bring them into existence. Unite yourselves to us brothers, and fight with us …’ For the first time, the ideas of the European Enlightenment were turned against European power.
Rights of women
Under the extraordinary conditions of 1792, the question of the ‘rights of man’ also became, briefly, a question of the ‘rights of women’. On 6 March, Pauline Leon, a 23-year-old Parisian chocolate-maker, read a petition to the legislative assembly demanding the formation of a women’s national guard. The petition was signed by 319 Parisian women, including cooks, seamstresses, market-sellers, and wives and daughters of shoemakers, butchers, lawyers and doctors.
On 26 March, the 30-year-old Theroigne de Mericourt, a figure romanticised and demonised by historians and novelists, in a speech to one of the Paris sections, took the call for a woman’s right to bear arms into broader territory. ‘Compare what we are with what we should be in the social order . . . Break our chains. It is finally time that women emerge from their shameful nullity, where the ignorance, pride and injustice of men have kept them enslaved for such a long time.’
Across the channel, Mary Wollstonecraft was completing her Vindication of the Rights of Woman. Cautiously as Wollstonecraft proceeded, focusing mainly on women’s rights to education and barely hinting at political equality, her work was greeted with horror by the polite classes and consigned to oblivion for the best part of a century.
She shared that fate with many of the revolutionary agents of 1792, which was also a year of reaction. The royal proclamation of May, aimed at Paine and the corresponding societies, marked the beginning of a decade of repression (‘Pitt’s Terror’ in popular legend) as severe as anything in British history. The upshot was the silencing of radical dissent and the crushing of popular aspirations, in the course of which a modern elite-driven British nationalism was fashioned, a development whose consequences are still very much with us.
Paine himself barely escaped arrest when in September he crossed the channel to take his seat as an elected deputy in the convention. The world’s first international revolutionary addressed a challenge to his fellow representatives: ‘In seeing Royalty abolished and the Republic established, all France has resounded with unanimous plaudits. Yet some who clap their hands do not sufficiently understand the condition they are leaving or that which they are assuming . . . it is little to throw down an idol; it is the pedestal that above all must be broken down.’
Imprisonment and defeat
Within little more than a year, Paine would be imprisoned by the revolution he celebrated. On his release after 11 months, he returned to the convention to restate his commitment to that revolution, and to warn the deputies, unsuccessfully, against limiting the franchise by a property qualification.
In the short-term, the democratic radicals of 1792 suffered defeat, isolation, imprisonment or death. Women’s political clubs were banned in November 1793 and nearly all the women militants fell victim to the purges of 1793-95. Toussaint died in a French prison. Leaders of the LCS and the Edinburgh convention were jailed and some transported to Botany Bay. In 1798, the United Irishmen were crushed, at a cost of 30,000 Irish lives.
It would take another 120 years for Ireland to achieve partial freedom and women to win the vote. The anti-colonial struggle, launched in Haiti, remains incomplete. The social democracy envisioned by Paine only came into existence after 1945, and its vestiges are now being stripped away. So were all these struggles ‘premature’, doomed to failure, a waste of passion and effort? Readers can make up their own minds about that.

Politics, our missing link

admin — Mon, 17 Sep 2012 10:00:42 +0000

We get the word ‘politics’ from ancient Greece, where polis was used to describe the city‑states that emerged in the sixth century BC. The polis was more than a community or concentration of individuals. It was a self-conscious unit of self‑administration (independent of empires) and from the start was made up of separate, contending social classes.
As Ellen Meiksins Wood explains in her revelatory studies of classical antiquity, Athenian democracy was itself the product of a class struggle and a class compromise, involving aristocrats, on the one hand, and, on the other, artisans and small-holding peasants, who became ‘free citizens’, sharply differentiated from slaves. It was in the context of Athenian democracy that politics emerged as a distinct activity, one concerned with the affairs of the polis, considered as an entity separate from (and superior to) family or clan. Crucially, the polis was contrasted with the more limited and subordinate oikos, household, the private realm of ‘economy’.
Today we’re told that the law of the oikos is dominant, and the polis must yield. Only of course the oikos is no longer the individual household – to which it is deceptively likened – but the imperatives of global capital.
In present-day Greece, we’re witnessing a dramatic clash between polis and oikos – democracy and capital. Here as elsewhere the latter prevails to the extent that it succeeds in making its laws appear implacable, the alternatives mere wishful thinking. Yet the roots of the crisis lie precisely in the non-political autonomy of the economic, in deregulated finance’s detachment from production.
Under neoliberalism, the political realm has been squeezed. Globalisation and privatisation have removed much of the life of the polis from democratic control. Since the fundamental choices have already been made elsewhere, and systemic alternatives are excluded, politics itself becomes depoliticised, a matter of management and expertise, not of ideology or mass constituencies. As the neoliberal consensus was imbibed by the parties of the centre left, politics increasingly became ‘politicking’: the manipulation of images and the clash of personalities.
This evisceration of the political lies at the root of today’s popular anti-politics: the complaint that ‘they’re all the same’ or ‘all in it for themselves’; the desire to get over or somehow circumvent the ‘divisiveness’ of politics; the calls for politicians to ‘work together’. ‘Politics’ is seen as an alien realm of duplicity, opportunism and contrived conflict, not a common concern. Ironically, no one is keener to exploit popular anti‑politics than professional politicians. See the rise and fall of Nick Clegg.
A cloud of cynicism settles over everything, leaving vested interests and real choices invisible. It’s a superficial, easily manipulated scepticism, a problem for the left and a boon for the right.
In the end, this illusory non-political politics is the property of the dominant powers. A good example is the Olympics, where the hoary old apartheid-era slogan ‘Keep politics out of sport’ is once again in favour. Of course, what those who say they want ‘politics out of sport’ really mean is that they want other people’s politics out of sport; they want no politics but their own (that is, corporate and state sponsored messages about competition and identity). This is the paradigm we have to reject, the political ideology that masks itself as non‑political.
We have to be clear that there is no non‑political, non-partisan answer. That politics needs to be ‘divisive’. That the anti-politics of today are impotent. That avoiding choices means handing them to others all too willing to exercise the prerogative.
Left-wing anti-politics
A kind of anti-politics is also widespread on the left. A healthy contempt for mainstream ‘politics’ is combined with a more ambiguous distrust of political organisation in general. We need to be careful that in our rejection of what passes for ‘politics’ we do not inadvertently mirror the de-politicised universe of global capital we want to challenge. In Britain (as elsewhere), politics is our weak spot, the missing mediator without which we can never achieve our goals.
Politics in the sense I’m talking about is the linking of principle with practice, ideas with power, processes with goals, movements with institutions (whereas the simulacrum called ‘politics’ separates all these). Politics means interaction, intervention, agency in relation to the polis – understood (as in ancient Athens) as the arena in which the direction of the commonwealth is set. It means contesting the existing balance of power.
Engaging with the polis (the citizenry, the larger political whole) isn’t about placating the majority but addressing it, honestly and in comprehensible and coherent terms. Politics is always and necessarily partisan. It means making enemies. It therefore carries with it demands for organisation, discipline and sacrifice; it can never be a continuous festival.
Don’t get me wrong. I’m not asking for a politics stripped of desire, imagination, spontaneity. No politics can succeed without to some extent generating its own expressive culture. But that culture, no matter how subversive, cannot substitute for political action. Nor does politics mean abandoning utopia. On the contrary, utopian ideas are vital levers in the contest for political power in the here and now. Politics does, however, mean working out the links between today’s conditions and tomorrow’s utopia, the steps from here to there.
The left has no shortage of policy proposals and alternatives. They’re bubbling up everywhere, not least in the pages of Red Pepper. But politics means coordinating and integrating this welter of ideas, making choices, rejecting some, prioritising others – in other words, creating a programme.
It’s a hard and under-appreciated process, with a negative reputation for dogmatism and sectarian competition. Of course, a programme should be fluid and responsive to changing conditions; ‘the letter killeth but the spirit giveth life’. However, without a programme (forged and fought for collectively), we’ll remain at a hopeless disadvantage. It will always be an uphill climb to make ourselves more convincing, more credible than the prevailing consensus. Sheer negative reaction to the system will not carry us through.
Finally, politics implies the left‑right spectrum (which many greens seek to evade). This spectrum has its origins in revolutionary France, where it accompanied the birth of modern politics, and reflected a division that was not about ethnicity, religion, or region, but about ideas and classes, which is why it became globally recognised. And it is still, I think, unavoidable and necessary (if not always straightforward). When someone claims to have superseded the left-right spectrum, they’re evading the reality of a divided society.
The hardest task
To come now to the hard part. Yes, politics does imply elections and elections imply parties (and programmes). Of course, a party that is merely an electoral machine has actually abandoned politics. But a movement without an electoral intervention is doomed to lose out in the final analysis. Yes, we can hope to influence the mainstream, to push it towards the left, and above all to use our power in the street to change the political context. But being satisfied with that is letting down all those who need more, those who cannot afford to leave the same corporate-sponsored caste in power year after year.
Surely this is one of the lessons of Latin America, where social movements found or created effective political vehicles, won elections, formed governments and achieved real social change, however limited or fragile. To varying degrees, the left parties there have been able to break with neoliberalism, reclaim the polis and politicise the oikos. In contrast, the evolving Arab Spring looks badly hampered by the absence of political formations, leaving the popular movement at the mercies of western imperialism and conservative Islamism.
Back in Britain, the prospects for building a political alternative are so forbidding that most of us have given up talking about it. It’s the hardest task, with the least promise of immediate success, which is why it can’t simply be left to ‘history’ (to someone else). Having said that, I confess I have no road map, no concrete proposals to take us in that direction. First, I suspect, there will have to be a larger number of people agreeing that we do indeed need to redress the political gap and provide the missing link.
www.mikemarqusee.com

Olympics: The Games turned upside down

admin — Fri, 27 Jul 2012 18:34:48 +0000

In a world where the words ‘iconic’ and ‘icon’ have been so cheapened by overuse, it’s salutary to recall their original meaning. In religious use, an icon is a representation that is more than a representation, an image that contains a power beyond itself. It’s not merely familiar or typical (or self‑referential). It’s not a triumph of image over reality; it’s a deeper connection between image and reality, in which the former draws power from the latter.
That’s what makes the image of Tommie Smith and John Carlos on the podium at the 1968 Mexico Olympics that rare thing, a genuine icon. But its iconic power can only be reactivated, and the image saved from the banality of contemporary ‘iconography’, if we delve into the moment and its meaning, its background and its aftermath.
This is what makes The John Carlos Story (Haymarket Books) such a wonderful gift. Carlos’s intelligence, humour, ruefulness and righteous wrath make him a commanding observer and narrator. He’s sensitively aided by the cutting-edge socialist sports writer Dave Zirin, whose columns and books fearlessly explore race and class, money-power and media‑hypocrisy. Together, they’ve turned a sports autobiography into a powerful social testament.
From boycott to podium
Carlos explains how, in early 1968, he joined a handful of other elite African‑American athletes in the newly formed Olympic Project for Human Rights. The idea was to mount an African-American boycott of the upcoming Olympics in order to dramatise the continuing oppression of black Americans. Four demands were agreed: the hiring of black coaches (a crucial issue for the athletes, whose daily lives were managed by older white men imbued with racist assumptions); the restoration to Muhammad Ali of the heavyweight title stripped from him because of his refusal to take part in the war in Vietnam; the exclusion of apartheid South Africa and Rhodesia from the Olympic movement; and the removal of the head of the IOC, Avery Brundage – a long time white supremacist, going back to the days when he helped Hitler secure the 1936 Olympics.
Despite valiant efforts, the OPHR activists were unable to persuade many of their fellow competitors to sign up for a boycott; for most of them the Games represented a once in a lifetime opportunity. In the end, the OPHR activists decided they too would take part, and as a result of that decision Carlos, Smith and their allies found themselves in a position to turn the Games upside down.
In the 200 metres final, Smith won the gold in world record time, with the Australian Peter Norman in second, fractionally ahead of Carlos. With Norman’s support (he’s wearing the OPHR badge on the medal podium), Smith and Carlos staged their protest before a global audience. As the US national anthem played and the US flag fluttered overhead, the two African‑American champions raised clenched fists and bowed their heads.
As Carlos explains, the accompanying symbolism was hastily improvised: black gloves for black unity and strength, bead necklaces to remember the lynch mobs, black socks and no shoes for black poverty. But the message was unmistakeable – and profoundly provocative.
These were African-Americans who would not allow their success to be used to bolster America’s image, to imply that black people in America enjoyed freedom and equality. They repudiated this image as a sham, a cover-up, a false unity, and at the same time they posed against it a different solidarity, a higher unity. In so doing they dramatically subverted the core symbolism of the Olympic podium, where individual excellence is harnessed to national identity. It was a globe-spanning message in a globe‑spanning language.
The context of ’68
As Carlos makes clear, the context was everything. It was 1968, and the wave of protest and repression had rolled through America and Europe and into Mexico City on the eve of the Olympics, when the military fired on protesting students, killing hundreds. In making their stand, Smith and Carlos brought the spirit of ’68 to the centre of the Olympic arena, breaching the citadel of sport, so often hailed as a haven from politics. They were able to do that because of their own relationship to the swelling currents of global activism. They knew that when they stood, they would not stand alone.
In narratives of the 1960s it is common to find the latter part of the decade, with its sometimes extreme and violent rhetoric, contrasted unfavourably with the earlier, more innocent and high-minded years. Many historians lament in particular the passing of the integrationist, nonviolent phase of the civil rights movement and its displacement by the militant black power phase.
They forget that this shift occurred because of the frustrations and failures of the earlier phase, out of which arose the need for a deeper, more systematic analysis as well as more effective forms of action. They also neglect the achievement of black power in releasing the self-reliant cultural energies of black performers – among them Smith and Carlos. Their protest was a flower of that movement and moment: a black nationalism with an internationalist vision, in which African-Americans were seen as members of a global community of the oppressed.
Unfinished business
Smith and Carlos were expelled from the Olympic village and returned home to find themselves vilified. They were denounced as ‘black storm troopers’ who had disrespected their country and, most heinous of all, had shown a shocking ingratitude for all America had done for them. For years Smith and Carlos were treated as pariahs by the athletics establishment. There were no sponsorships, no coaching or media jobs for these world record beaters. To feed his family Carlos took jobs as a gardener, in a grocery store and an aluminium factory, and a stint in American football.
As the political movement that had inspired his action disintegrated, Carlos and his family were isolated. His marriage broke down. In 1977, after years of financial distress and mounting depression, his wife, the childhood sweetheart who stood by him every step of the way in 1968, took her own life.
After much struggle, Carlos found a rewarding life as a school guidance counsellor, though it’s only in the last decade that he and Smith have received the recognition they’re due. Carlos makes clear that the demons still haunt him, that there’s still unfinished business. Not least political business.
In his story, the narrative arc of trial and redemption so familiar from sports autobiographies and Hollywood biopics is invested with depth and realism – because it’s linked to a wider social struggle. The bravery was real and so was the suffering that followed. It is this history, feeding into and flowing out from the famous image, that makes the Smith/Carlos moment so deeply resonant and so enduringly relevant.
Colonised by capital
Since Carlos’s day, the Olympics, like so many other parts of the commons, have been colonised by global capital. At London 2012, the podium will serve as a symbol of the holy triad: individual competitive excellence, national identity and corporate overlordship.
As Carlos notes, the removal of the indigent from public view by the host city has become as much part of the Olympic ritual as the torch relay. Along with that has come the establishment of Olympic zones as licensed private dictatorships, in which rights to free expression and assembly are suppressed for the duration. An aggressive assertion of intellectual property rights, ruthlessly enforcing the corporate sponsors’ exclusive claims to the Olympic entity, will be matched by an unprecedented security clampdown, ensuring neither local residents nor protesters against corporate sponsors are able to disrupt the flow.
Like global capital, the Olympics have been cast as a juggernaut, an irresistible force with laws of its own to which we must all submit. In deference to that higher command, we’re told to swallow the exorbitant expense, the dubious ‘legacy’, the loss of rights, the trickle-up economics. We’re told to ignore the aching contrast between public austerity and Olympic extravagance. Despite the attempted lock down, the contradictions in the whole enterprise loom large, and one way or another, they’re bound to surface.

Streets of the imagination

admin — Thu, 13 Oct 2011 19:38:21 +0000

Events over the summer brought to mind William Blake’s uncompromisingly angry poem ‘London’, written in the early 1790s under the impact of revolution in France and repression at home. The poet wanders ‘through the charter’d streets/near where the charter’d Thames does flow’, where he encounters signs of widespread distress. He hears the sound of ‘the mind-forg’d manacles’, the fears and prejudices that keep people in thrall to an unjust social system. Above all, he sees the exploitation of youth: chimney sweeps, soldiers, prostitutes – victims of state, church and commerce, Blake’s tyrannical trinity.
Blake called London’s streets ‘charter’d’ because so much of the city’s economic life was subject to ‘charters’ granting exclusive privileges to private corporations. In 1791, they had been denounced by Thomas Paine as ‘aristocratical monopolies’ because of which ‘an Englishman is not free of his own country; every one of those places presents a barrier in his way, and tells him he is not a freeman – that he has no rights.’
In ‘London’ Blake confronts what we would call today a privatised London (even the river), whose ultimate ghastly manifestation is prostitution. ‘But most through midnite streets I hear/The youthful harlot’s curse’ – the contractual commodification of desire, which serves, ironically, to spread sexually transmitted disease. Marriage and prostitution are daringly linked as the twin sides of a pervasive social hypocrisy. The poem ends with the chilling, terrifically compressed image of ‘the marriage hearse’, society’s primary institution damned as deadly.
All this from a walk around London, at that time the world’s largest and fastest-growing city. Nowhere else was there such a convergence of wealth and poverty; nowhere else was the market so ruthlessly dominant.
Lifelong Londoner
Blake was a lifelong Londoner. Along with Shakespeare, an adoptive Londoner, he is the least well travelled of all major English poets – venturing no further than the Thames estuary and the Sussex coast. As a journeyman engraver, he was one of many London artisans drawn to radical ideas in religion and politics, and from whose ranks the London Corresponding Society, Britain’s first plebeian political organisation, was formed in 1792.
Blake grew up in the London of ‘Wilkes and Liberty’ and always avowed himself ‘a Liberty Boy’. Like most London artisans he supported the American revolution. And when London exploded in five days of riots, the most extensive in the city’s history, in June 1780, he was there – at the front of the crowd, whether by accident or design.
The ‘Gordon Riots’ began in anti-Catholic demonstrations whipped up by the maverick MP George Gordon. In their initial phase, Catholic places of worship and businesses (mostly foreign merchants) were attacked, though no Catholics were killed. Soon the crowd, having mastered the streets, changed tack and targets, turning its ire on the Bank of England, the homes of judges (ransacking the mansion of the Lord Chief Justice), and above all the jails. They broke open crimping houses (where impressed sailors were confined), debtors’ hostels, and one after another all the city’s prisons, culminating in Newgate – the biggest and most notorious of them all, London’s Bastille. Hundreds of prisoners were released and the building was burnt to the ground.
According to Blake’s first biographer, Alexander Gilchrist, writing in the 1860s, Blake was minding his own business at his home in Soho when ‘Suddenly he encountered the advancing wave of triumphant blackguardism, and was forced (for from such a great surging mob there is no disentanglement) to go along in the very front rank and witness the storm and burning of the fortress-like prison.’ To which a London magistrate in 2011 would mutter ‘a likely story!’ before imposing a maximum sentence.
Which cause?
It took 10,000 troops to suppress the riots. Between three and four hundred rioters were killed; 450 were arrested; 25 hanged. How ‘political’ were these events? Who were the rioters and what did they seek?
In The London Hanged, Peter Linebaugh identifies diverse participants: apprentices, journeymen artisans, domestic servants, tripe-sellers, coffee house waiters, laundresses, seamstresses, as well as a number of African-Americans, ex-slaves who made up 6 to 7 per cent of London’s population. When Thomas Haycock, a waiter, was asked by a judge why he had rioted, he replied simply: ‘The cause.’ Which cause? Haycock explained: ‘There should not be a prison standing on the morrow in London.’
Blake was 23, had just completed his apprenticeship and commenced what would prove to be a deeply frustrating freelance career. In every respect he fitted the profile of the rioter and if he later recast his participation as involuntary, there is no doubt of the event’s impact on him. That year he first conceived the image later titled ‘Glad Day’ or ‘Albion Rose’ – in which a classically proportioned male youth springs majestically from the earth, embodying the exaltation and energy of liberation. Some time later he gave it the caption:
Albion rose from where he labour’d at the mill with slaves
Giving himself for the Nations he danc’d the dance of Eternal Death.
Blake was to live through decades of war and reaction. His hopes for public recognition and an escape from penury were repeatedly dashed. But he pursued his lonely prophetic vocation and continued to produce stunningly original poems and images. He spent his last years in a two room flat in an insalubrious tenement adjacent to where the Savoy Hotel now stands. The one redeeming feature was the small window that afforded a view of the ever-busy Thames.
To the end Blake remained responsive to London’s confused, generous, mean-minded, moody, all-powerful and impotent crowd, and to the hypocrisies of its rulers. ‘I behold London,’ he exclaimed, ‘a Human awful wonder of God!’ In his final masterpiece, ‘Jerusalem’, completed in 1820, Blake spoke of London’s unwilling warriors, the sailors in the crimping houses:
We were carried away in thousands from London; & in tens
Of thousands from Westminster & Marybone in ships closd up:
Chaind hand & foot, compelld to fight under the iron whips
Of our captains; fearing our officers more than the enemy.
City of the mind
For Blake, London is a psyche, a city of the mind. ‘My Streets are my Ideas of Imagination,’ he has it declare, ‘My Houses are Thoughts; my Inhabitants, Affections.’ It is both microcosm (of human civilisation) and macrocosm (containing many worlds). It exists everywhere and nowhere, always and never, like ‘Lambeth’s Vale/Where Jerusalem’s foundations began; where they were laid in ruins.’
In the rhythmic litanies of London place-names found in Blake’s later works, the poet traces the course of his giant visionary forms: from ‘Highgate’s heights & Hampstead’s, to Poplar Hackney & Bow:/To Islington & Paddington & the Brook of Albions River/We builded Jerusalem . . .’
Out of familiar workaday London, Blake conjures a sanctified geography, treating the modern city and its neighbourhoods the way the bible treats ancient Palestine. He sees it as a decisive battleground in the epic spiritual-political struggle through which ‘intellectual war’ must overcome ‘corporeal war’. Here Los, the poet-prophet-blacksmith, labours at his forge. ‘On the banks of the Thames, Los builded Golgonooza’ – a multifaceted, jewel-like city of applied imagination, Blake’s capital of artisans. ‘In fears he builded it, in rage & in fury. It is the Spiritual Fourfold London: continually building & continually decaying desolate!’
Finally, Blake sees liberated London as a meeting-place for all that is human: ‘In the Exchanges of London every Nation walk’d/And London walk’d in every Nation, mutual in love & harmony.’
This is a defiantly republican London. A London without kings or priests or financiers or their ‘hirelings’, the publicists and apologists whom Blake reviled. A London of free labourers, in which individual and collective creativity flourish together, a city thriving off the dialectic of the one and the many.

The bedrock of autonomy

admin — Mon, 15 Aug 2011 23:34:31 +0000

Now entering my fifth year of living with multiple myeloma, a haematological cancer, I reflect back on a roller-coaster ride of symptoms, treatments and side effects. Whatever else this experience has brought, it’s been an education. But what exactly have I learned? To begin with, that any glib answer to the question misses the core of the experience – the sometimes murky dialectic of being ill, which is a social as well as physical condition.
For me, the experience has led to a heightened awareness of our intricate dependence on others, as well as our deep-seated need for independence.
Sitting with my IV drip, I like to think about all the human labour and ingenuity that come together in this medical moment. The inventory is endless.
The first circle of dependence is immediate and sometimes intimate. Partners, friends, doctors, nurses, cleaners, porters. I’m also dependent on a vast network of people I never see: pathologists, pharmacists, IT engineers, equipment repairers and supplies managers. Everyone who has anything to do with maintaining the supply of medications or the functioning of equipment or getting me to and from hospital. Everyone who makes sure the lights are on and the building safe. The whole intricate ballet that is a functioning hospital. One misstep, one breach in the rhythm, one failure to be at the appointed spot at the appointed time, and the whole breaks down, with potentially dire consequences.
Beyond that, I’m dependent on a long history of scientific development to which individuals and institutions in many countries have contributed. From the British chemist Bence Jones identifying the protein associated with multiple myeloma in the 1840s to the pathologist and one-time film star Justine Wanger developing the IV drip in the 1930s. From the Irish physician Francis Rynd, who invented the hollow needle in the mid-19th century, to Don Thomas of the University of Washington who pioneered bone marrow transplants in the 1980s. From the first experiments with chemotherapy (a by-product of chemical warfare) in the 1940s, through the protracted struggle to master the art of toxicity (a dialectic of creation and destruction if there ever was one), to the discovery of proteasome inhibitors in the 1990s and the subsequent creation of new ‘targeted therapies’, like the one I’m currently receiving.
Without innumerable essential advances in immunology, pathology, biochemistry, chemical engineering, statistics and metallurgy, to name but a few, I wouldn’t be where I am now – in fact, I wouldn’t be at all.
The story of scientific advance is also, of course, a story of errors, false hopes, cynical exploitation and misappropriated resources. We’ve come a long way from the 2nd century AD when Galen, doyen of Roman medicine, declared that cancer was caused by melancholia; or from the treatment – rhubarb and orange peel – given to the first patients diagnosed with myeloma in the 1840s. Even as recently as the 1950s myeloma patients were given a standard urethane therapy that was later shown to be completely ineffective.
The drip flowing into my vein is drawn from a river with innumerable tributaries. It is an entirely rational, intelligible process, but no less miraculous for that.
Not just hard science
And it’s not just a story of hard science. Alongside that, and necessary to it, is the whole history of the hospital (which for many generations was primarily a place you went to die, not to be cured), of the discipline of nursing, and of a host of social developments that made it possible to convert raw science into practical care.
I’m acutely conscious of how dependent I am on those who built and sustained the NHS, including, pre-eminently, generations of labour movement activists and socialists. And as I sit with my IV drip I’m mindful of those in government and business who would smash the delicate mechanism of the hospital and shatter the network of dependence that sustains me. (Among other things, the disassembling of the NHS runs counter to the thrust of advanced thinking on patient-centred care, which stresses a multi-disciplinary and integrated approach.)
I’m being kept alive by the contributions of so many currents of human labour, thought, struggle, desire, imagination. By the whole Enlightenment tradition but not only that: by other, older traditions of care, solidarity, mutuality, of respect for human life and compassion for human suffering. The harnessing of science, technology and advanced forms of organisation and information to compassionate ends is by no means automatic. It leans on and is only made possible by the conflict-riddled history of ethical and political development.
Beautiful as it is, this network of dependence is also frightening. Restrictions in capacity and mobility are hugely frustrating and relying on others to supplement them is not a straightforward business – for patient or carer. As a cancer patient I often feel I’m engaged in a never-ending battle for autonomy. I fight it out in relation to institutions (including hospitals), experts (who claim to know more about my situation than I do), medications (an endless struggle to find an elusive balance), means of mobility, forms of diet. Not to mention the vital effort to live a life beyond illness, to hold on to that kernel of freedom that makes you who you are.
Struggle for autonomy
Paradoxically the struggle for autonomy is one you can’t win on your own. You need allies, and part of being a carer is being an ally, a comrade, not a nursemaid or controller. Independence is the stuff of life. It’s motion, energy, free will, the capacity for self-development. But you can achieve it only through dependence on others, individuals and institutions, past and present. That’s a truth driven home to the cancer patient, but applicable to all of us. As is the realisation that the most rewarding use of the independence thus secured is in the service of a creative and compassionate engagement with others, building higher dependencies – new networks of mutuality.
Illness is anything but an ideology-free zone. Certainly not for the government, which aims to divide sufferers into acute cases deserving of support and less acute ones that must be forced out into the labour market, where our only function will be to undercut wages and job security. This is one among many reasons why resistance to the attacks on benefits for people with disabilities and long-term illnesses ought to be a central plank of the anti‑cuts movement.
The crisis facing the disabled and the ill is an extreme form of the crisis facing all those dependent on the public sector in whatever manner (the majority of the populace). We don’t want charity – the form of dependence that makes independence impossible – but rights and the resources to exercise those rights. Speaking for myself, taking part in anti-cuts activity is some of the best therapy available: an unashamed acknowledgment of social dependence and at the same time a declaration of political-spiritual independence.
Being ill makes salient some critical features of the underlying human condition, not least the dialectic of dependence and independence. Even in the most despairing moments, the utmost dependency, the politics of illness turns out (for me) to be a politics of struggle and hope, the harbinger of a solidarity flowering out of our common but always idiosyncratic weaknesses. n
Contending for the Living is Mike Marqusee’s regular column for Red Pepper. www.mikemarqusee.com

Let’s talk utopia

admin — Sun, 17 Jul 2011 04:55:02 +0000

In 1818, Shelley visited his friend Byron in Venice, where his Lordship was camped out in a decaying palazzo, ruminating on the city’s faded glories. Their conversations – on human freedom and the prospects for social change – formed the basis for Shelley’s poem Julian and Maddalo, in which the mild-mannered English rationalist Julian (Shelley) puts the case for hope, and the brooding Italian aristocrat Maddalo (Byron) argues for despair. ‘We might be otherwise,’ Julian insists, ‘we might be all / we dream of: happy, high, majestical’ were it not for our own ‘enchained’ wills. To which Maddalo replies bitterly: ‘You talk utopia!’
That snap dismissal echoes down to our own day. We’ve been taught to fear utopian thinking, which is denounced as not only impractical but positively dangerous: the province of fanatics. In ignoring the lessons of history and the realities of human nature, utopian idealism results, inevitably we are told, in dystopian outcomes. It’s a modern version of the myth of Pandora’s box: a warning against being too enquiring, too ambitious.
Fear of utopia, a mighty weapon in the arsenal of the ruling powers, has a long pedigree. Since Burke, at least, conservatives have warned that tampering with established institutions, encouraging people to expect too much, leads to disaster. The ‘failure’ of every social experiment, from the French revolution onward, is seized on as evidence of the perils of utopian thinking. Anti-utopianism was a staple of cold war liberalism and was resuscitated as the ‘end of history’ thesis following the collapse of the Soviet Union.
Increasingly we have been told that a utopian denial of realities lurks in even the most modest demands for regulation and redistribution. When it comes to the apparent dearth of alternatives, I’d argue that social democracy’s long retreat into the arms of neoliberalism is as great a factor as the demise of the Communist bloc.
While there are dangers in utopian thinking, the much greater danger is its absence. The reality is that we on the left don’t ‘talk utopia’ nearly enough. We need the attraction of a possible future as well as a revulsion at the actual present. If people are to make the sacrifices required by any struggle for social justice, then they need a bold and compelling idea of the world they’re fighting for.
Critical tool
Utopian thinking is more than just model building: it is a critical tool, a means of interrogating present conditions. We have to exercise that supremely political faculty, the imagination, if we are not to be prisoners of a prevailing consensus.
Utopias provide a perspective from which the assumed limitations of the present can be scrutinised, from which familiar social arrangements are exposed as unjust, irrational or superfluous. You can’t chart the surface of the earth, compute distances or even locate where you are without reference to a point of elevation – a mountain top, a star or satellite. Without utopias we enjoy only a restricted view of our own nature and capacities. We cannot know who we are.
We need utopian thinking if we are to engage successfully in the critical battle over what is or is not possible, if we are to challenge what are presented as immutable ‘economic realities’. Without a clear alternative – the outlines of a just and sustainable society – we are forced to accept our opponents’ parameters. We cede the definition of the possible to those with a vested interest in closing the aperture into a better future. The neoliberal slogan ‘There is No Alternative’ had to be answered by ‘Another World is Possible’, but we need to know and say much more about this other world.
In our utopian activity, let’s learn from past errors. It’s important to remember that a significant strand of utopianism, including Thomas More’s book, is linked to western colonialism. This took many forms, from dreams of imposing a new order on ancient or (allegedly) empty lands (of which Zionism is a modern case) to Romantic and Orientalist fantasies.
In their critique of Utopian Socialism, Marx and Engels made two charges. First, that the method was wrong: a socialism imposed from above, reliant on altruistic benefactors. Second, that it was not sweeping enough, that it failed to recognise the need to replace the system as a whole.
Vital guideline
Marx described communism as ‘the negation of the negation’ – and our utopianism must remain at least in part a giant negation: of exploitation, inequality, greed, prejudice. Marx is criticised for not telling us more about what comes after the negation, but he did leave us with a still vital guideline: From each according to his/her ability to each according to his/her need.
In our utopia the meaning of work will transformed; there will be no more precious commodity than a person’s time. ‘Choice’ will be redefined, salvaged from consumerism, and there will be a deeper sense of ownership than the individualist version touted by the current system.
Utopia is the good society, not the perfect society. A perfect society would be a static entity. Our utopia is one that is evolving, revising its goals and policies as circumstances change. It’s an open not a closed system. Which means identifying its governing principles, its driving processes, may be more important than postulating fixed structures.
A utopia without dissent and argument is a nightmare: a community of interminable sweetness and harmony is not for me. In fact, argument will flower on a higher plane, grounded in a shared public domain to which all have real and equal access – politics in the best sense, with no professional politicians.
We cannot leave our utopian activity to think-tanks. Nor should it be about some artificial ‘pre-figuration’, an exercise in isolated purity. It has to involve getting your hands dirty: finding places for the utopian in the everyday and learning from the everyday the meaning of utopia.
We need to draw on the utopian elements in our midst. The NHS is far from perfect, but it operates under egalitarian principles deemed ‘utopian’ in other fields and enjoys a significant degree of autonomy from the market, which makes it a kind of mini-utopia within British daily life – one reason the government is determined to destroy it. We need to find ways to connect to the utopian yearnings that move millions of people, and which both the right wing and the advertising industry know too well how to exploit. We have to offer something more participatory, concrete and at the same time dynamic, more of a process, a journey, than an end product polished by the intelligentsia. In doing that, we can draw on a rich tradition going back to the biblical prophets and found in almost every human society. In England alone, we can look to Langland, Winstanley, Thomas Spence, Ruskin, Morris and John Lennon – not forgetting More himself, in whose Utopia ‘gold is badge of infamy’.
Humbler relationship
Our utopia must imagine a new, humbler relationship between humans and their environment. The techno-utopias of the past with their dreams of total human mastery over nature now feel distinctly dystopic. On the other hand, the idea of an endlessly renewable energy source, a staple of science fiction, has moved from idle fantasy to urgent necessity. The climate change crisis is a good example of utopian thinking proving more realistic than its ostensibly pragmatic opponents. In the light of imminent catastrophe, utopia becomes common sense.
It is the anti-utopians who are guilty of arrogance and presumption in dismissing systematic alternatives as contrary to human nature (or economic ‘laws’). The utopians are more historically grounded. They know that capitalism had a beginning and will have an end. In contrast, neoliberals practise the pejorative form of utopianism: imposing an abstract blueprint on the human species (and the planet), subordinating diverse human needs to the single compulsion of private profit. We are encouraged to entertain limitless, if narrowly defined, aspirations for ourselves as individuals, but our aspirations for our society are strictly ring-fenced. While it is held to be fatal to ignore economic realities, ecological realities can be indefinitely deferred.
For William Blake, the work of utopia was a daily duty of the citizen. At the end of his Vala or the Four Zoas, he envisioned a world in which ‘the dark religions are departed and sweet science reigns’. It’s now up to us to imagine a world free of the dark religion of neoliberalism, in which the sweet science of human solidarity prevails.

Palestine’s wandering poet

admin — Tue, 26 Apr 2011 10:48:45 +0000

On a bright winter morning we made a pilgrimage to the hill of Al Rabweh, on the outskirts of Ramallah, where the poet Mahmoud Darwish is buried. An ambitious memorial garden is planned, but at the moment it’s a construction site littered with diggers and cement mixers. The oversize tombstone is crated up in plywood. We were welcomed by cheerful building workers and joined by Palestinian families paying their respects and taking snaps. Sitting amid the pines overlooking the tomb (and a nearby waste ground populated by stray dogs), we spent an hour reading Darwish’s State of Siege, a sequence of poems he wrote in response to Israel’s 2002 assault on the city. Here he called on poetry to ‘lay siege to your siege’ but observed bitterly that:

This land might just be cinched too tight
for a population of humans and gods

Darwish was six in 1948 when his family fled their village in western Galilee. When they returned a year later they found the village destroyed and their land occupied. Since they had missed the census they were denied Israeli citizenship and declared ‘present-absentees’, an ambiguous status that Darwish was to transform into a metaphor for Palestine and much more.
He was 22 when he read his poem ‘Identity Card’, with its defiant refrain ‘Record: I am an Arab’, to a cheering crowd in a Nazareth movie house. Repudiating Golda Meir’s assertion that ‘there are no Palestinians’, his poems played a key role in the Palestinian movement that emerged after 1967, fashioning a modern Palestinian identity using traditional poetic forms in a renewed, accessible Arabic.

Repeatedly arrested and imprisoned, Darwish left Israel in 1970 and remained in exile for more than a quarter of a century. His political journey led from the Israeli Communist Party to the PLO, which he joined in 1973 (penning Arafat’s famous ‘Don’t let the olive branch fall from my hand’ speech to the UN). He settled in Beirut, from which he was expelled along with the PLO following the Israeli invasion of 1982, the subject of his inventive and harrowing prose memoir, Memory for Forgetfulness.

In the years that followed, Darwish wandered – Tunis, Cyprus, Damascus, Athens, Paris – broadening his poetic scope and deepening his insight. He was elected to the PLO executive committee in 1987 but resigned in 1993 in protest at the Oslo accords. ‘There was no clear link between the interim period and the final status, and no clear commitment to withdraw from the occupied territories,’ he explained. It’s said that when PLO leader Yasser Arafat complained to Darwish that the Palestinian people were ‘ungrateful’, the poet (remembering Brecht) snapped back, ‘Then find yourself another people.’

Oslo did allow Darwish to return to Palestine and in 1996 he settled in Ramallah, only to find himself under siege again six years later. In his last years he wrote more prolifically than ever, responding to the tragedies of Iraq, Lebanon and the violent conflict between Palestinian factions:

Did we have to fall from a tremendous height so as to see our blood on our hands … to realise that we are no angels … as we thought?
Did we also have to expose our flaws before the world so that our truth would no longer stay virgin? How much we lied when we said: we are the exception!

When Darwish died in 2008, thousands joined the cortege and there were candle-lit vigils in towns across the West Bank and Gaza. The Palestinian Authority declared three days or mourning and issued a series of postage stamps in his honour.

Being the Palestinian national poet was a heavy burden, one that Darwish bore from an early age, and though he chafed under it he never shirked the load. Instead, he succeeded in transforming the Palestinian experience into a universal one. The themes of loss, exile, the search for justice, the dream of a homeland, the conundrum of identity: all became, as his work evolved, human and existential explorations, without ceasing for a moment to be rooted deeply in the vicissitudes of Palestinian life. For decades he mourned Palestine’s losses, denounced its tormentors, celebrated its perseverance, and imagined its future.

And we have a land without borders, like our idea
of the unknown, narrow and wide
… we shout in its labyrinth: and we still love you, our love
is a hereditary illness.

Though preserving Palestinian memory and identity was his life’s work, Darwish conceived of this as a creative act of self-renewal: ‘Identity is what we bequeath and not what we inherit. What we invent and not what we remember.’ Among his last verses was this admonition:

We will become a people when the morality police protect a prostitute from being beaten up in the streets
We will become a people when the Palestinian only remembers his flag on the football pitch, at camel races, and on the day of the Nakba

Darwish was a ‘national poet’ who challenged as well as consoled and inspired his national audience. As he moved away from his earlier declamatory, public style towards a more personal idiom, elliptical and oblique, and at times (unpardonable sin for a ‘national’ poet) obscure, he met resistance. ‘The biggest achievement of my life is winning the audience’s trust,’ he reflected in 2002. ‘We fought before: whenever I changed my style, they were shocked and wanted to hear the old poems. Now they expect me to change; they demand that I give not answers but more questions.’
Even in translation, where we miss so much, Darwish’s voice rings clear. In his mature style there’s a seductive fluidity: he moves lightly from realm to realm, pronoun to pronoun (‘I’ to ‘we’, ‘I’ to ‘you’, ‘us’ to ‘them’), from the intimate to the epic, past to future, abstract to concrete. Metaphors topple over each other, abundant and inter-laced. This is poetry that fuses the political and the personal at the deepest level.

Throughout, his evocation of loss and exile, of coming from ‘a country with no passport stamps’, is poignant, elegiac but open-ended, conjuring resolution from despair: ‘We travel like everyone else, but we return to nothing’; ‘There is yet another road in the road, another chance for migration’; ‘Where should we go after the last border? Where should birds fly after the last sky?’; ‘In my language there is seasickness. / In my language a mysterious departure from Tyre’.

Guests on the sea. Our visit is short.
And the earth is smaller than our visit
… where are we to go
when we leave? Where are we to go back to when we return?
… What is left us that we may set off once again?

Yet, convinced that ‘Out of the earthly/ the hidden heavenly commences’, Darwish affirmed the richness and beauty of life, especially life in its ordinariness:

We have on this earth what makes life worth living: April’s hesitation, the aroma of bread at dawn, a woman’s point of view about men, the works of Aeschylus, the beginning of love, grass on a stone, mothers living on a flute’s sigh and the invaders’ fear of memories

In one of his late poems, Darwish pays tribute to his friend Edward Said, putting this advice in Said’s mouth:

Do not describe what the camera sees of your wounds
Shout so that you hear yourself, shout so that you know that you are still alive, and you know life is possible on this earth.

Biblical justice

admin — Fri, 04 Feb 2011 23:02:46 +0000

A body of antiquated dogma and myth, a source of repression, paean to patriarchy, bulwark of hierarchy. That’s how many would summarise the bible, and there are more than enough juicily quotable biblical passages to justify that view. But there’s much more to this book – or rather, this collection of texts by various hands – than either its detractors or devotees often suppose.
Take 1 Samuel, Chapter 8, where the elders of Israel come to the sage-judge Samuel and ask him to appoint a king ‘to govern us like all other nations’. Samuel, after consulting with God, warns them to be careful what they wish for. Under a king, their sons will be conscripted ‘for his chariots and his horsemen’ and made ‘to reap his harvest and to make his instruments of war’. Their daughters will be forced to work in the king’s kitchens. Their vineyards and olive groves will be seized and given to the king’s cronies. To support the army and bureaucracy they will be taxed to the tune of 10 per cent of everything they produce. Nonetheless the elders insist on having a king, to be ‘like all other nations’.
That the Jews should become like other nations (‘normalised’, with a territory, state and army of their own) was one of the earliest Zionist arguments. But here, at the founding of what many see as the first ‘Jewish state’, the biblical author raises troubling questions about the whole idea of statehood. In the work of the prophets, who were mostly critics of the monarchy, these questions would be amplified.
The Hebrew bible embraces contending voices and visions, even within a single text attributed to a single author. It incorporates ‘official’ and ‘unofficial’ narratives, temple orthodoxy and subaltern dissent, laudatory regime chronicles and savage critiques of those regimes. Most of it was composed between 750-500 BCE by authors living in small, poor states in the isolated highlands west of the Jordan – a frontier region between the competing empires of the Nile and Mesopotamia. The strategic situation was perpetually vulnerable and state authority uncertain. Ironically, these weaknesses meant that there was more space for the clash of ideas and for self-critical perspectives than in the monolithic empires to the north, east and south.
Some prophets oppose all imperial entanglements; others urge tactical submission or collaboration. In parts of the bible, the great empires are depicted as brute instruments of God’s judgement. Their capacity for destruction is vividly evoked, but so is their ephemeral nature. In the fate of empires, biblical authors saw the possibility of an epochal overturning of hierarchies:
‘He humbles those who dwell on high, he lays the lofty city low; he levels it to the ground and casts it down to the dust. Feet trample it down – the feet of the oppressed, the footsteps of the poor.’ (Isaiah 26:5-7)
The best of the prophets
Although the bible includes reams of ritual prescriptions, it also includes criticism of the emptiness and hypocrisy of ritual. Against the legalistic regime of the priests, the best of the prophets posited an ethical and spiritual religion, a credo of social conscience. In Isaiah 58:6-9, God makes clear what kind of worship he prefers:
‘Is not this the kind of fasting I have chosen: to loose the chains of injustice and untie the cords of the yoke, to set the oppressed free and break every yoke? Is it not to share your food with the hungry and to provide the poor wanderer with shelter, when you see the naked, to clothe them?’
Malachi denounces the ‘rulers of Israel, who despise justice and distort all that is right; who build Zion with bloodshed and Jerusalem with wickedness.’ Similarly, Micah comes ‘to declare to Jacob his transgression, to Israel his sin’. He resists the siren voices of the establishment: ‘I will not listen to the music of your harps. But let justice roll on like a river, righteousness like a never-failing stream!’
‘Justice’ means above all justice for the poor and vulnerable. The greatest criminals, Isaiah argues, are those who ‘deprive the poor of their rights and withhold justice from the oppressed of my people, making widows their prey and robbing the fatherless.’ New Labour may have been ‘intensely relaxed’ about the accumulation of great private wealth, but many of the biblical authors are anything but.
Isaiah (3:13-15) cries out: ‘What do you mean by crushing my people and grinding the faces of the poor?’ And Proverbs 28:11 archly observes: ‘The rich are wise in their own eyes; one who is poor and discerning sees how deluded they are.’
Amos excoriates traders for ‘skimping on the measure, boosting the price and cheating with dishonest scales.’ Israel will be destroyed, he says, because: ‘They sell the innocent for silver, and the needy for a pair of sandals. They trample on the heads of the poor as on the dust of the ground and deny justice to the oppressed.’ In particular, Amos warns that God will be ‘quick to testify’ against ‘those who defraud labourers of their wages… and deprive the foreigners among you of justice.’
Amos and other prophets influenced the later writers who drew up the social codes contained in the first five books of the bible. These include restrictions on the rich that would be regarded as intolerable by current economic orthodoxy. ‘If you lend money to one of my people among you who is needy, do not treat it like a business deal; charge no interest.’ ‘The land must not be sold permanently, because the land is mine and you reside in my land as foreigners and strangers.’ ‘Do not take advantage of a hired worker who is poor and needy, whether that worker is a fellow Israelite or a foreigner residing in one of your towns. Pay them their wages each day before sunset, because they are poor and are counting on it.’
Contradictions
This social vision had its contradictions. Much of the Hebrew bible takes for granted the justice of collective punishment, extending even into unborn generations.
However, in the wake of the final destruction of the ancient Hebrew state and the deportation to Babylon, biblical authors stressed individual salvation and reshaped their God as a comforter in exile and distress (thus laying the basis for the New Testament).
The Book of Job, composed some decades after the exile, turns the justice debate on its head. Job is a just man who suffers injustice. In his complaint, the suffering of the innocent is laid at God’s feet. Job’s friends, who come as comforters but speak as defenders of orthodoxy, are appalled: ‘Does God pervert justice? Does the Almighty pervert what is right?’
Yes, Job insists, he does: ‘God has wronged me and drawn his net around me. Though I cry, ‘Violence!’ I get no response; though I call for help, there is no justice.’ Job refuses to compromise his ‘integrity’ by accepting that he is to blame. God’s response, ‘the voice out of the whirlwind’, is a poetic triumph, imagining the cosmos from a non-human perspective, and though it over-awes Job, it really answers none of his questions.
Like other biblical texts, Job is puzzling and open-ended. It demands interpretation, calls for a response, even if that response is a rejection of monotheism and its internal contradictions. The best of the bible writers leap across time and space to question us with intimacy and urgency. What they’d have to say about the deficit-chopping governments of Europe would probably get them pulled from the internet.
www.mikemarqusee.com

Spreading the pain

admin — Tue, 30 Nov 2010 16:48:51 +0000

Since politicians in general feel obliged to genuflect before the altar of cancer, it’s not surprising that the government has made strenuous efforts to cast itself as a defender of cancer patients. Some of its measures are genuinely beneficial. Innovative bowel screening procedures will save thousands of lives, and extra money for new, expensive life-extending cancer drugs will benefit thousands more (including me).
But the government’s headline cancer pledges are minute compensation for its spending programme’s detrimental impact on cancer patients in general.
Far from being ‘ringfenced’, the NHS will be forced to make – and already is making – substantial cuts in services. The 0.1 per cent per annum real terms increase is nowhere near enough to keep pace with demand (a significant part of which comes from the increasing numbers of people diagnosed with cancer). What’s more, this paper-thin increase is qualified by the previously announced demand for £20 billion in NHS ‘efficiency savings’. A government health insider admitted to the Guardian that in the coming years ‘a fifth of everything the NHS does today will stop’.
Like all those with serious long-term illnesses, cancer patients are bound to suffer disproportionately. Longer waits –the government has already abandoned the one week target for cancer test results – will add to the 10,000 lives lost every year as a result of late diagnosis and treatment.
Closures of wards, departments and hospitals will mean more exhausting and costly travel. As health workers try to treat increasing numbers with ever more restricted resources, quality of care is bound to diminish.
A small example from my own experience. One of the less pleasant features of having a haemotological cancer is the need for periodic bone marrow tests, which involve the insertion of a needle into the pelvic bone. I’ve learned that the longer the doctor takes in applying the anaesthetic, the less the pain – and an extra 15 minutes makes the difference between the excruciating and the just about bearable. Under increasing financial pressure, that extra 15 minutes will become a luxury. The cuts mean, quite brutally, more avoidable pain for more people.
Even more frightening
The implications of the government’s proposed reorganisation of the health service (costing £3 billion, five times the amount promised for new cancer drugs) are even more frightening. Once cancer symptoms are detected, patients are referred to hospitals for long-term treatment. In my case, for three and half years since my initial GP referral, overall responsibility for my health has been undertaken by Barts hospital in London, whose staff have dealt with all manner of unpredictable symptoms, aches and pains related and sometimes unrelated to my underlying disease.
Under the government’s proposals for GP commissioning, self-financing hospitals will have to refer back each case as it evolves to GP consortia for renewed commissioning – or risk not being paid for the services they deliver. Operating within budgetary constraints, the GPs will then have to decide whether treatments are necessary, affordable and the cheapest available. So basic decisions about my care will be made by a doctor who is not actually involved in treating me.
Meanwhile, hospitals are being encouraged to increase their revenues by taking in an unlimited proportion of private patients – who will, of course, only pay if the care they are offered privately is superior to what they can get for free on the NHS. The resulting two-tier system will inevitably end up downgrading the majority of cancer patients, forcing others to reach deep into their own pockets to ensure they receive the best available treatment.
Cancer patients require multi-disciplinary care involving diverse specialists often scattered across different sites. The proposed fragmentation of the NHS can only obstruct the timely delivery of integrated care and in the end make it more costly. Fragmentation will also spell the end of national bargaining, conditions and career structure. Cancer patients are profoundly aware how much their welfare depends on the commitment and diligence of NHS workers. In the long run a poorly rewarded, insecure, overworked and in many cases casualised staff can only provide a lower standard of treatment.
The biggest single boon for present and future cancer patients would be raising care across the country to the standard of existing best practice. The government’s plans will make that impossible. The postcode lottery will be exacerbated, and with it the already unacceptable inequalities in outcomes for cancer patients.
The poorer you are, the more likely you are to get cancer and the less likely you are to survive it. Unskilled workers are twice as likely to die from cancer as professionals. Between 1999 and 2003, mortality from all cancers was 70 per cent higher among the most deprived men and 40 per cent higher among the most deprived women when compared to the least deprived groups. What’s more, cancer patients with lower incomes are less likely to die at home or in a hospice and more likely to die in hospital.
Even the fact that cancer survival rates are improving for all social groups (albeit at an uneven pace) will become a mixed blessing, given reduced resources to meet the demands of long-term illness. Cancer patients will be hit hard by local government cuts, which will restrict services such as occupational therapy, transport and recreational facilities. And the absence of local government-provided care options will lead, in turn, to increased ‘bed-blocking’ in hospitals, yet another squeeze on NHS resources.
Tougher tests
The government is looking to make major savings by imposing tougher tests for disability benefits. Already, Citizens Advice reports that under the new regime many people with cancer and other long-term conditions are being ruled ‘fit to work’ when they are nothing of the kind. The government is also time-limiting disability benefits and excluding from benefits people with assets, savings or partners who work. At the same time, higher unemployment totals will make it harder for anyone with a long-term illness to ‘compete’ in the jobs market. All around, it’s a policy package that spells personal disaster for large numbers of cancer patients.
On top of this, government cuts in science funding will impair research into cancer prevention and treatment – in lethal disregard of the dictum of US health activist Mary Lasker: ‘If you think research is expensive, try disease.’ Meanwhile, the most promising recent scientific advance, individual genetic assessment leading to personally customised therapies, will remain beyond NHS means and unavailable to the great majority of UK cancer patients.
The numerous cancer advocacy groups perform minor miracles in raising awareness and funds. But the government’s plans present a challenge to their customary approach. If they are going to serve their constituents effectively, they will have to overcome the reluctance to engage in ‘politics’ and take an active role in the broader campaign against the cuts.
Finally, an appeal from one very grateful patient to NHS workers: the government takes advantage of your sense of commitment to your patients, but by letting them do so you are doing no favours for those patients. Reluctance to take any action that might disrupt patient care is understandable, but by not taking action you may be doing harm to your patients’ long-term prospects. You may feel you have little power, but collectively you have much greater power than individual patients. We need you to take action on our behalf, action that is a necessary extension of the sense of dedication that guides you in your daily work.